Song-A-Day 2019

Another song that started with a sound. The main metallic piano riff showed up while noodling with different sounds and I managed to overcome the inertia of noodling to actually hit record. That’s often the hardest part of any writing project: knowing when to just get to it. I looped 8 bars of the main riff, added the drums, and then started humming until words started showing up. But they were nowhere close the the words that ended up in the song. I’d guess there were at least five or six thematic first drafts that I’d throw away when they … Continue reading

Whenever I listen to music, I frequently find myself trying to figure out what the key little thing is that inspired it. Sometimes it’s a lyric, sometimes it’s a musical hook, sometimes it’s just the beat, but you can often pick out that one cool thing that led to the rest of it. If I were doing that to this track, it would probably be the line, “Silent shapeless creatures crawl out of our sight.” That just seems like a nice phrase that could easily have led to the overall theme and sound. But it wasn’t. It was that four-note … Continue reading

I spent much of the day recreating project templates and reinstalling plugins and patch libraries. Part of this was procrastination, but mostly it was to overcome the frustration I get when technology gets in my way. As I installed the various libraries, I randomly selected the piano patch you hear in this piece. I was just noodling with it as I installed other things and the main chord progression started insisting itself on me. As I played that, I started humming a rough melody and a word would slip out every now and then. The mood quickly established itself, and … Continue reading

Ok, some rules of engagement to start the month. In these daily posts, I’ll mostly be posting lyrics, and possibly some production information or war stories from the composition and posting. What I thought went right and wrong, ideas that might not have made it into production in time, or things that might need to go away later. What I won’t be doing (very often) is discussing meaning. If it’s obvious what it’s about, then it’s obvious what it’s about. If it’s not obvious what it’s about, then it’s up to you to decide what it’s about. Run, Run, Run … Continue reading